The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [54]
MOYERS: It is described in your book The Way of the Animal Powers—here:
CAMPBELL: “When people sing, I dance. I enter the earth. I go in at a place like a place where people drink water. I travel a long way, very far.” He’s entranced now, and this is a description of an experience. “When I emerge, I am already climbing. I’m climbing threads, the threads that lie over there in the south. I climb one and leave it, then I climb another one. Then I leave it and climb another.… And when you arrive at God’s place, you make yourself small. You have become small. You come in small to God’s place. You do what you have to do there. Then you return to where everyone is, and you hide your face. You hide your face so you won’t see anything. You come and come and come and finally you enter your body again. All the people who have stayed behind are waiting for you—they fear you. You enter, enter the earth, and you return to enter the skin of your body.… And you say ‘he-e-e-e!’ That is the sound of your return to your body. Then you begin to sing. The ntum-masters are there around.” Ntum is the supernatural power. “They take powder and blow it—Phew! Phew!—in your face. They take hold of your head and blow about the sides of your face. This is how you manage to be alive again. Friends, if they don’t do that to you, you die.… You just die and are dead. Friends, this is what it does, this ntum that I do, this ntum here that I dance.”
My God! This guy’s had an experience of another whole realm of consciousness!. In these experiences they are, as it were, flying through the air.
MOYERS: He then becomes the shaman.
CAMPBELL: Not in this culture. He becomes the trance dancer. All the men are potentially tranced.
MOYERS: Is there something like this common in the experience of our culture? I’m thinking particularly of the born-again experience in our Southern culture.
CAMPBELL: There must be. This is an actual experience of transit through the earth to the realm of mythological imagery, to God, to the seat of power. I don’t know what the born-again Christian experience is. I suppose medieval visionaries who saw visions of God and brought back stories of that would have had a comparable experience.
MOYERS: There’s a sense of ecstasy, isn’t there, in this experience?
CAMPBELL: As reported, it’s always of ecstasy.
MOYERS: Have you ever seen such a rite? Such a happening? Have you ever known that kind of ecstasy or witnessed it?
CAMPBELL: No, I have not. I have friends who have been in Haiti a good deal and actually participated in voodoo ceremonials there where people become possessed. And there are dances where the ecstasy is simulated. There was an old idea of going berserk in war, of exciting warriors before they go to battle. They should actually be in a madness while they’re in battle—the battle frenzy.
MOYERS: Is this the only way one can experience the unconscious?
CAMPBELL: No, the other way occurs as a breakthrough for people who have not been thinking that way—and then it comes to them, bang, like that.
MOYERS: And the one who had this psychological experience, this traumatic experience, this ecstasy, would become the interpreter for others of things not seen.
CAMPBELL: He would become the interpreter of the heritage of mythological life, you might say, yes.
MOYERS: And what draws him into that?
CAMPBELL: The best example I know which might help to answer that is the experience of Black Elk.
Black Elk was a young Sioux boy around nine years old. Now, this happened before the American cavalry had encountered the Sioux, who were the great people of the plains. The boy became sick, psychologically sick. His family tells the typical shaman story. The child begins to tremble and is immobilized. The family is terribly concerned about it, and they send for a shaman who has had the experience in his own youth, to come as a kind of psychoanalyst and pull the